I love Nintex Workflow

If you want to give your SharePoint power users the ability to create workflows without (or even with) the use of SharePoint Designer then Nintex Workflow 2007 is the workflow tool to use.

What surprised me was the fact how relatively easy it is to create quite complex workflows using the webbased workflow designer of Nintex.

Most of the time I’ve been using workflows within SharePoint in combination with InfoPath forms. One the biggest issues I’ve had in the past was the whole task-driven way approach where there was no real information about the form you are approving.

So what does Nintex does? You probably wouldn’t have guessed it but it completely eliminates almost all the issues I had using SPD! ;)

Another key thing is that customers don’t need developers anymore to create this kind of workflows using Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer but instead the power now lies in the business where people can create their own workflows. Maybe this last statement is a little bit over exaggerated but you get the idea. But maintaining a Nintex workflow is much more easier and better to understand for the end-user then a SPD workflow is.

Maybe consultants, like us, are needed to setup the initial workflow (together with the creation of forms (InfoPath or SharePoint Lists). But then with a simple guidance (check out the excellent tutorials at the Connect site of Nintex) and training, the power users can create/maintain workflows themselves and thus save your IT department a lot of money and time. The time that was once needed to complete a single SPD workflow, which btw is not very DTAP-able (Development, Test, Acceptance, Production) can now be used to complete multiple Nintex workflows which are (in a way (using the Import and Export functionality) DTAP-able). I’m still investigating if there is a way of adding Nintex workflows in a SharePoint solution so it can be part of a real SharePoint solution :)

I haven’t looked in the SDK yet but it is possible to add custom actions as it is for SPD, so don’t worry that your beautifully crafted custom actions are not available anymore when you start using Nintex. You only need to make it available in Nintex, so some extra steps are required (for creating the dialogs, validation, etc).